China Travel Forum

[hazirat]

Does anyone have any experience cruising with Viking to China? How were the land accomodations?

[kamal]

This is a great trip! The tour guides really make this an enjoyable vacation. We went in June 2004. Please note, this is a very busy itinerary! They really want you to see and experience many different aspects of the new emerging China. This trip is not for people who have difficulty walking or climbing stairs.
We stayed in one of the Suites and it was outstanding. My mother and daughter stayed in a regular room and found it more than satisfactory. The biggest complaint they're getting concerns the amount of closet/drawer space in the ship cabins.
Finally, the limitations on luggage on the intra-China flights (44lbs per person, and 11 lbs per carry-on) were not a problem. They weigh ALL of the tour groups checked luggage in bulk, not individually, and to my knowledge, none of the carry-on luggage was challeged.
This is a first rate vacation, especially if you like a nice full itinerary!
if you need tourguide you can write to ilham@muztagh.net who helped us to finde a great guide.
have a good tour

[Dean]

We went on the ill fated August 30th trip which was stalled at the Three Gorge dam for 6 days because of flooding above the dam. I'm writing to let you know of the disappointment we experienced on your August 30 Yangtze River cruise. The cruise portion was a trip to nowhere. We arrived very late on the boat at Wuhan, and shortly after departing; the captain learned that the Three Gorges Dam locks might close shortly, due to the flooding up river. He raced past our first stop, thus missing the school at Jingzhow and we wound up docking just below the dam at Yichang because the locks were already closed. There we sat for four nights with all the wonderful incumbent smells and noises, while the Captain tried to discern when the locks would eventually open. His 30 plus years, of Yangtze River experience, did not give him a clue that this one hundred, or was it a one thousand, year flood was not going to allow us to pass for several days.
It is not that we didn’t do anything for those four days. Oh, there was the exciting trip to the world-renowned Sturgeon museum. It’s hard to top that. We did do a gorge tour one day but I know we missed other more spectacular gorges than the one we saw. The finally insult is that when the locks finally opened we were kicked off the boat so that it could race up the river to pick up the new incoming group at Chongqing. We went to a hotel in town to await a 5-hour bus trip backwards to Wuhan the next day.
I realize they are new to China but I think you have some responsibility to handle this kind of situations better than you did. When this happened on a Tauck tour of the Rhine River, they put us up in a 5 star palace in Baden Baden, and we never missed a scheduled stop.
I'd look for a cruise line that has been there longer. Just trying to contact some after the trip to register our complaint and to go for compensation was one big delay after another. They define the term customer no service.

[Hazrat]

Wow!! That August 30, 2004 trip was obviously a major disaster for the folks on it....my sympathies. However, my family and I went on the 'In The Footsteps Of Marco Polo' excursion in June, 2004, and one couldn't have asked for a better trip. All went exactly according to plan, both on land and river, the guide was outstanding, there were NO hitches, delays, hangups or problems of any kind. The ship was fine, although perhaps not quite as nice as the Viking Spirit we were on in Europe, our tours were in nice, clean, new buses, and our stays on land were in truly first class and excellent hotels. All meals were very good, although we did get a bit tired of Chinese food and finally just HAD to have a burger! One does need to keep an open mind and remember that OUR definition of what is 'normal' or 'expected' is not necessarily that of other cultures.
A 'fast shuffle' by the tour company is really not acceptable, however, and it sounds like Viking could/should have handled it better in August. The reason I used Viking in China was based on my outstanding experience with them in Europe. And yes, I'll use them again